Leading Out Loud

by Terry Pearce

A Guide for Engaging Others in Creating the Future

TLDR

• This book focuses near entirely on communcation: Authentic, vulnerable communcation and exactly how to achieve it
• This book is a little overly formal, and is probably about 30-40% longer than it needs to be, enlisting the use of the creation of a guide that you can later reference when communicating. For me, this seemed a little overkill, but I can see how this may be helpful, especially in difficult situations. All this being said, the content is very good, if verbose.

Why?

If you have read other management books and want to focus very deeply on communication as a leader, this is worth the read. Otherwise, read something more general first.

Important concepts

There is a constant and heavy focus on emotions and connecting with others, generally, this fell into two categories:

• Authenticity: Displaying oneself accurately, allowing others to fully see you.
• Empathy: Ensuring that you not only hear your counterpart, but respond in a way that they are most likely to accurately hear you. I felt a good distinction made in this book and not others that are similar is that even if you fully listen to everything someone says, responding with the incorrect emotion may trigger them to trust you and your answer less.